This module allows an admin to automatically close, hide, or delete posts in selected forums after a selected period of time. Each forum can be configured individually. Sticky posts can be excluded.

Settings:
On the settings page for this module you can set each forum to have its own custom actions on selected messages. You can choose to close, hide, or delete posts based on the age of either the starting topic or the last post in the topic. You can set any number of hours, days, or months (30 days) after which to process the posts.

You must use a cron job to process posts with this module. You have two options to do this. If your host supports cron jobs on your server, you can set your own cron job using the "scheduled" hook. If your host does not support cron jobs, you can use a third party service, such as www.setcronjob.com or www.cronless.com. I don't endorse any particular service and others can be found on Google with a search for "free cron jobs."

In either case, I would advise running the cron job once per hour. If your site receives more than 1000 posts per hour and you are having posts automatically deleted then the cron job should be run more often.

Setting up a Cron Job on Your Server:
Your hosted cron job should call the Phorum "scheduled" hook from the Phorum script.php file. The module will handle any time-outs or errors which otherwise could cause the cron job to run two instances of this module. This is one example cron job:

There should be no output from this script unless there is an error. If possible I would also advise that you have the output from this script either logged or emailed.

Setting up a Cron Job Through a Third Party Service:
Each third party service will have its own setup instructions but all of them should ask for a url which will be opened on a regular schedule. The url to use for this module is provided at the top of the settings page. Simply highlight and copy the entire url in the text box. This url includes a unique certificate for your site, generated the first time you open the settings page.

What would be the use case for that? (just interested about it) It sounds rather contra-conceptual to me. To me, stickies are always manually managed, so I'm interested to know how you use the stickies.

When module functionality would have to be written, then I think it would be more appropriate as a separate module, than to add it to this message pruning module. The functionalities do not really match IMO. But maybe your use case makes it logical to do so.

the main reason is lazyness :)
"my" moderators use stickies for messages that should stay on top for a limited time, think of them as some kind of reminder. those messages should not be deleted, but "vanish" in the normal posts after a given time. unfortunately, they use it very often and they tend to forget to un-sticky them. so it would be nice to to make them unsticky automatically.

I guess I would agree with Maurice that this should be a separate module. Ideally it would create a third "Temporary Sticky" sort option on the posting form. The admin would then determine how long these types of messages should remain sticky. After that time, the message would be set to normal through a cron job. Unfortunately I am back to the weekly grind and it is a busy week on top of that. I may try hand at this sometime soon, but no promises.

I been wanting a module like this to delete messages in some of my forums that are older than 6 months.

So I downloaded this module and follow instruction but for some strange reason I couldn't save one of the forum settings and it would error out when I run the script. When I click Save to save my module settings one of the last forum setting would just get wiped out and go back to default blank setting.

I wonder if this issue is because I am using Store file on disk module?

All of our post attachment are storage on disk instead of in DB, we would like to see those attachement deleted along with the posts. it like over 100,000 photos in there is the main reason why we would need this module.